Selfless Love shows how meditation can help us realize that we don’t love—we are love.

Gentle, elegant, and radically inspiring, Selfless Love presents a holistic, experiential meditative path that enables us to see beyond our preconceived notions of identity, spirituality, and humanity. Drawing equally from Zen parables, her experience as a mental health therapist, and the Gospels, Ellen Birx shows us that through meditation we can recognize that our true selves are not selves at all—that all beings are united in unbounded, infinite awareness and love, beyond words.

Recognizing the limitations of language in describing the indescribable, Birx concludes each chapter in the Zen tradition of “turning words” with a verse meant to invite insights.

Forthcoming due February 2014. The Stages of the Doctrine, or ten rim (bstan rim), refers to a genre of Tibetan spiritual literature that expounds the Mahayana teachings of the bodhisattva path within the framework of a graded series of topics, from the practices required at the start of the bodhisattva’s career to the final perfect awakening of Buddhahood. This approach, inspired by Atisha’s seminal Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, evolved within the original Kadam school, and its associated texts came to be known as Lam Rim (Stages of the Path) and the Stages of the Doctrine.

This volume contains three key texts of the Lam Rim genre, all of which exerted seminal influence in shaping the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The first text, the Blue Compendium, presents the instructions of the original Kadampa master Potowa, who is accredited with founding the Kadam lineage of the great treatises. It was recorded by his student Dolpa.

This text is followed by Gampopa’s revered Jewel Ornament of Liberation, which remains the most authoritative text on the path to enlightenment within the Kagyu school. The final text is a masterwork of the Sakya tradition, Elucidating the Intention of the Sage by Sakya Pandita, and it was chosen for inclusion in this Library of Tibetan Classics series by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This masterly exposition of the bodhisattva’s path is crucial for understanding the general development of Buddhist thought and practice in Tibet during the critical period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

When the Dalai Lama was forced to go into exile in 1959, his copy of Tsong-kha-pa’s classic text The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment was one of the few items that he could take with him. This text distills all of the essential points of Tibetan Buddhism, clearly unfolding the entire Buddhist path to enlightenment. In 2008, celebrating the long-awaited completion of the English-language translation of this text, the Dalai Lama gave a historic six-day teaching at Lehigh University to explain its meaning. From Here to Enlightenment makes this momentous event available for a wider general readership.

Scholarly and popular consensus has painted a picture of Indian Buddhist monasticism in which monks and nuns severed all ties with their families when they left home for the religious life. In this view, monks and nuns remained celibate, and those who faltered in their “vows” of monastic celibacy were immediately and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist Order. This romanticized image is based largely on the ascetic rhetoric of texts such as the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. Through a study of Indian Buddhist law codes (vinaya), Shayne Clarke dehorns the rhinoceros, revealing that in their own legal narratives, far from renouncing familial ties, Indian Buddhist writers take for granted the fact that monks and nuns would remain in contact with their families.

The vision of the monastic life that emerges from Clarke’s close reading of monastic law codes challenges some of our most basic scholarly notions of what it meant to be a Buddhist monk or nun in India around the turn of the Common Era. Not only do we see thick narratives depicting monks and nuns continuing to interact and associate with their families, but some are described as leaving home for the religious life with their children, and some as married monastic couples. Clarke argues that renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fabric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms.

Surveying the still largely uncharted terrain of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, Clarke provides a comprehensive, pan-Indian picture of Buddhist monastic attitudes toward family. Whereas scholars have often assumed that monastic Buddhism must be anti-familial, he demonstrates that these assumptions were clearly not shared by the authors/redactors of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes. In challenging us to reconsider some of our most cherished assumptions concerning Indian Buddhist monasticisms, he provides a basis to rethink later forms of Buddhist monasticism such as those found in Central Asia, Kaśmīr, Nepal, and Tibet not in terms of corruption and decline but of continuity and development of a monastic or renunciant ideal that we have yet to understand fully.

Laos remains one of the few officially socialist countries in the world. Once a Buddhist kingdom, its involvement into the Vietnam War, the communist revolution of 1975 and the subsequent introduction of reformed socialism have deeply affected Buddhism, the religion of the ethnic majority. With a historical and anthropological focus on the religious field in the capital Vientiane, the book follows these transformations and extrapolates the ruptures and continuities of Buddhist religious life from 1958 to the present. Focusing on the intertwined fields of ethics, ritual gift exchange and the Buddhist sangha’s relationship to the Lao state, the study takes a detailed look at the change of religious practices in an urban setting.

The first complete English-language life story of Longchenpa (1308-1364), one of the greatest masters in the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

Compiled from numerous Tibetan and Bhutanese sources, including Longchenpa’s autobiography and stories of his previous lives and subsequent rebirths, The Life of Longchenpa weaves an inspiring and captivating tale of wonder and magic, of extraordinary visions and spiritual insight, set in the kingdoms of fourteenth-century Tibet and Bhutan. It also reveals for the first time fascinating details of his ten years of self-exile in Bhutan, stories that were unknown to his Tibetan biographers.

Renowned as a peerless teacher, dedicated practitioner, and unparalleled scholar, Longchenpa thoroughly studied and mastered every one of the many Buddhist vehicles and lineages of teachings existing in Tibet at his time. Through his radiant intellect and meditative accomplishment, in both his teachings and written works, he was able to reconcile the seeming discrepancies and contradictions between the various presentations of the view and the path within the many lineages of transmission. His written works are also famous for being able to transfer true blessings just by reading or hearing his enlightened words.

About Adam Kō Shin Tebbe

Adam Kō Shin Tebbe (Kō Shin meaning Shining Heart) is editor at Sweeping Zen and is a blogger for Huffington Post's Religion section, writing mainly on topics of interest to Zen practitioners. Before starting the website in 2009, Adam trained to be a chemical dependency counselor. Adam is currently working on a documentary on Zen in North America (titled Zen in America) with a projected release date of 2017.

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Established in 2009 as a grassroots initiative, Sweeping Zen is a digital archive of information on Zen Buddhism. Featuring in-depth interviews, an extensive database of biographies, news, articles, podcasts, teacher blogs, events, directories and more, this site is dedicated to offering the public a range of views in the sphere of Zen Buddhist thought. We are also endeavoring to continue creating lineage charts for all Western Zen lines, doing our own small part in advancing historical documentation on this fabulous import of an ancient tradition. Come on in with a tea or coffee. You're always bound to find something new.

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